The Olfactive family

I grew up in Québec. The winters there are cold. The winters are VERY cold! People have to dress for the season.

Christmas and New Year’s parties would bring dozens of relatives for dinner, drinks and for card games. Since people would be dressed with layers upon layers of clothes, you usually needed to have an area designated for all the boots and coats.

The boots would end up in the basement, on a large carpet or on some old towel. But more often, the boots would simply end up in the bathtub. The logic being that the wet, slushy boots would create less of a mess in the tub as the snow would just melt and drain away. At the end of the party, the tub could be hosed down.
As for the coats, they would typically end up piled up on a bed. For the kids, this pile of fragrant coats was an irresistible playground. I was certainly attracted to it. 

The curly Persian lamb coat smelled like grandma’s Emeraude (Coty), the soft mink was giving off hints of aunt Y’s Miss Dior (the REAL one). The big cashmere overcoat was uncle P’sunmistakable mixture of Pierre Cardin and Export A, while aunt G’s coat was always a surprise Avon fragrance: Sweet Honesty, Imari, Topaz... I often ended up falling asleep in this soft, fragrant, comforting pile of coats.

While I had some relatives who wore perfumes, most of them were on my mother’s side of the family. I can’t recall a single person on my father’s side who wore perfume.

 

In my own family, my dad was the only one to wear fragrance. Granted, it was aftershave, but he never ever forgot to splash on his aftershave in the morning. My dad wore Old Spice. At the time, I didn’t think that this was a glamorous as my uncle’s YSL or Pierre Cardin, but I did like it. I loved it actually. I remember fighting with my brother so that I could sit behind my dad in the car, just so I could smell his Old Spice.

 

Strangely enough, my mom didn’t really wear perfume. She used scented bath products, mostly Avon’s Skin So Soft, and she did have Blue Grass (Elizabeth Arden) body powder that came in a container that looked like a Chinese lantern. At some point I bought her a bottle of Amazone (Hermès). She also wore Anais Anais (Cacharel) and Ombre Rose (Jean Charles Brosseau) but there is not one scent though that I can truly identify with my mother. There’s not one scent that would instantly make me think of her.

 

Who wore the scent in your family?

What fragrances trigger memories of your loved ones?